Chromecast: What People Are Saying

Mario Queiroz Google 's vice president of product management, held Chromecast s it was announced Wednesday.

For a few shining hours before Facebook’s earnings triumph, Google’s new Chromecast commanded the headlines.

This is what we know: Chromecast looks like two-inch thumb drive, plugs into the HDMI port of a TV and can be controlled by a person’s mobile device or laptop using a wireless connection. It works with Android and iOS devices, as well as Chrome-powered laptops. It’s $35 and is for sale online at Best Buy, Amazon and Google Play.

The biggest praise for the device so far has been cost and ease of use. The knock: streaming media and mirroring content from a browser can be a choppy experience. A lot depends on the strength of your WiFi connection.

But it’s worth reminding that Chromecast is early days and will be refined over time, and that most websites are only giving initial impressions. These aren’t full reviews.

Chromecast is pure simplicity: Search and discovery of video content is happening on the mobile device or laptop, and all Chromecast does is stream media from the cloud. Add to that the ability to turn on your TV simply by starting video playback on your tablet, and you’ve got something that looks a bit like the anti-Google TV.

There have been a few other solutions that try to pull something similar off like Apple’s AirPlay and Roku’s Streaming Stick. But both of those have required you to buy a $100 device to connect to your TV. Nothing else has been so device independent, cross platform and, well, cheap.

After a quick hands-on, we (quickly!) found that the Chromecast experience is awful if you don’t have a solid WiFi connection. (For a sense of how bad the wifi was in the room where we were testing, it took close to a minute just to get Google results for “free Simpsons video.”) Got a lousy router? You’d better beware.

Chromecast only streams video from the web; it has nothing like AirPlay. You can’t send video from your phone to Chromecast. Other than price, I can’t see why anyone wouldn’t just buy an Apple TV instead. And even price-wise, it’s not like Apple TV is expensive.

Chromecast will allow people to select YouTube video content using their Web-connected tablet, for instance, and have it play on their television. If Google gains a foothold in helping more Web content appear on TV screens, that could be a boon to Google’s core advertising business, as no other company sells more online search, graphical and video ads across millions of websites and apps.

But expect pushback. [Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome and Android], said that media companies had the ability to block their content from Chromecast, which major broadcast networks did with Google TV.

Chromecast is hardly the final stop on the road to Internet-connected TVs that allow users to watch whatever they want whenever they want on any device they want. Instead, it is one more offering in an already fractured market. Tech companies have been trying many experiments to merge TV and the Internet, and in the process get a share of TV viewing and advertising.

For music fans, Chromecast, for all its charm and inexpensive allure, still leaves Google well behind its competitor Apple, when it comes to wireless music playback in the home, and even further behind wireless music specialist Sonos.

Of course, anyone with any common sense, who doesn’t work in legal or biz dev at a large entertainment company, knows that it’s silly to argue that something that’s on one screen shouldn’t be on another. And anyone who wants to buy a cable and connect their laptop to their TV could already do this.

That last bit is the biggest limitation I can see from the initial announcement — the Chromecast only supports four apps at launch. That puts it well behind established players like Roku and Apple TV, and limited functionality was one of the major knocks against the ill-fated Nexus Q.

The true test will be if and when Apple launches its much rumored and highly anticipated Apple TV successor. Google will need to be able to offer a solid counter-argument; Chromecast support should be but one part of its marketing artillery.

Google failed to point out one necessary component of the Chromecast dongle: a microUSB power cord that must be plugged in at all times in order for the device to work. This is disseminated in the faintest of gray text on the more comprehensive product detail page.

Perhaps most interesting of all, we got to try a new beta feature of Chrome that lets you stream the contents of a web browser tab itself to your TV via the Chromecast. It’s not particularly impressive yet: scrolling doesn’t come close to keeping up with your finger, and there’s visible compression artifacts whenever there’s rapid motion: it’s a lot like streaming game services like OnLive and Gaikai, but with a lot more delay. Google says it uses WebRTC, so it’s basically online video chat repurposed to display anything you can see in a browser frame. Video plays with only a bit of chop and stutter, and lips don’t quite sync up with the audio, which could be maddening for some. Don’t expect this to be a surefire solution for watching Hulu without a subscription.

What the Chromecast does, and devices that will follow it will do, is extend out the world that we love of smartphones and tablets, not require us to change the way in which we use them, and then improves the experience. This $35 piece of kit changes that dynamic, but within the sphere of being in a post-PC world. This is all done in a gentle, organic way.

These are early days for the Chromecast, and not all of its features worked quite as effortlessly in our office as they did for Google in the company’s Wednesday demo. But considering the impulse-buy price of $35, Chromecast is still a worthy purchase—especially since it includes three months of Netflix streaming, a $24 value.

As expected with anything marked beta, the tab-casting feature crashed a few times. Playback would freeze, attempt to buffer, and eventually return to the Chromecast’s “ready to cast” start screen—once with a sheepish error message that said just “Brain freeze.” Still, with an SDK to let more developers add in-app support, a low price, and cross-platform compatibility, the Chromecast has a lot going for it.